ABSTRACT
Tranquillity, reform, renewal: these are appropriate terms describing the condition of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. After the repeal of the Corn Law Act in 1846 ‘the storm of controversy dies rapidly down into a pleasantly exciting breeze before which the country drives “sails filled and streamers waving” past the dangerous reefs of India and the Crimea into the halcyon weather of Palmerston's old age’. 1 Legislation had brought peace; the Chartists were subdued; fears of revolution were allayed. At the same time there was to be no return to aristocratic paternalism, to wealth based predominantly on land, to nicely ordered relationships of feudal landed society. It was a time of change.
